Laurent P. Berger, visual artist graduated from ENSAD and Cyrille Berger, architect graduated from ENSAPLV have been collaborating since 2006 under the name Berger & Berger. In 1999-2000, Laurent P. Berger was awarded an Académie de France scholarship to Rome and was resident at Villa Médici. In 2006, he was involved in the Whitney Biennial in New York (Day for Night). His work has been shown at numerous exhibitions abroad : at Villa Medici in Rome (le Jardin, 2000), the Festival Romaeuropa (2000), at the Watermill Centre in New York (in 2002 and then in 2006), at Space in Progress/ TBA21 in Vienna (Puppets and Heavenly Creatures, 2005). In 2007 he was involved in the Rock ’n’ Roll Vol. 1 exhibition held at the Norrköpings Konstmuseum in Sweden and at the “Un teatre sense teatre” exhibition at MACBA, Barcelona followed by the Museu Berardo in Lisbon. In 2009 was a resident at Tokyo Wonder Site and in 2010 at Shizuoka Performing Arts Center. He is working in theatrical representation, opera and dance. In 2008, with his brother Cyrille, Berger&Berger was winner of the Nouveaux Albums des Jeunes Architectes a prize awarded by the French Ministry of Culture. Between 2008 and 2009 they were residents at Cent- Quatre in Paris. In 2009, they have been selected to participate in the program City Visions Europe, a designresearch program focusing on the urban condition in Europe, initiated by the Berlage Institute in Rotterdam. Cyrille Berger‘s work has been shown in 2008 at the 11th International Architecture Biennale in Venice, in 2009 at the 5th European Landscape Biennial in Barcelona and at the 2nd Biennale des Îles Canaries, Arquitectura Arte y Paisaje (Territorio - Paisaje en clave de produccion). In 2010, Berger&Berger is one of the international team of the Kazuyo Sejima’s 2010 Architectural Venice Biennale. Among their other projects, Blinder Berg (2007) a temporary opera house for the Opera Festival in Munich, Feuillets Hypnos, 237 actions for the scene represented in the courtyard of the Palais des Papes at the Festival of Avignon (2007), Miss Julie represented at the Barbican Centre (2011), Pompidou Mobile (2009) an itinerant structure for the Centre Pompidou, the Centre for Contemporary Creation Olivier Debré (2012), the artist residencies of the Centre International d’Art et du Paysage of île-de-Vassivière delivered in 2012, the redevelopment of public spaces of Pantin’s Centre National de la Danse which will be delivered in 2016 and the extension of the Collection Lambert in Avignon which was delivered this summer. “If there is a future to be found in French architecture, it is in this same post-critical tendency to empty architecture of its narrative superstructures, by erasing subjectivities to regain a certain whiteness of things, their psychological neutrality. But it is also – specifically in absolutely and joyfully submerging things by the real understanding of their intrinsic, physical, chemical and electromagnetic virtues – in changing paradigms where space no longer has meaning but a quantified physical presence where semantics give way to somatics, where cinematic references, story-telling, fiction and narratives give way to the world’s measured properties, to a new objectivity of things. Movement is there in the objective fiction of Aurélien Bellanger, in the Thomas Clerc’s analytical prose of space, in our work or in the work of Berger&Berger in the imagination enhanced by our present knowledge.” Philippe Rahm Excerpt from “De l’architecture post-critique”, published in La Nuit Est Plus Sombre Avant L’Aube, September, 2015, Manuella Éditions.
